Meet Potential Future of Third Party Cookies – Google Trust Tokens API
Earlier this year Google announced phasing out third party cookies across upcoming versions of Google Chrome by 2022 closely following the goal of private web. They had rolled a concept named Privacy Sandbox that would potentially meet the gap between maintaining user privacy and enhancing digital advertising transparency. Last week Google shared more updates about their work to improve user privacy in digital advertising
What is Trust Token API
A key & interesting aspect of Privacy Sandbox for developers & advertisers is Trust Token API. Currently in pre-Beta or Alpha, you can enable this feature in your build of Chrome by using “–enable-features=TrustTokens” in your browser console.
The API proposes – instead of actually tracking users as third party cookies do currently for fraud -prevention, measurement & segmentation purposes, a unique secure & signed token be exchanged between the website and the browser. Due to their unique nature & availability during the session, websites cannot use them for tracking purposes.
How does Trust Token API work to replace third party cookies?
[Update 03/08/2020] – Before reading further please note the below is an example usage of a tech in WIP. The objective is participate in Google’s thinking about solving the needs for third party cookies. I’ll keep this post updated with the latest
Meet the Participants
For our example we would assume I, Sagar visit a cool brand website & then later visit a publisher website that talks about cars. Cool brand wants to show me relevant ads as I read about cars.
Is Sagar Human or Bot?
Sagar visits coolecom.com upon recommendation. He is authenticated as a human only & only if he interacts/clicks. Coolecom identifies as a trust token issuer to the browser& defines metadata limited for personalization & measurement
Again, Is Sagar Human or Bot?
Sagar visits coolcars.com and the publisher finds that the browser trusts coolecom.com as the issuer. Browser requests a redemption asking if a valid token was issued recently & requests for content
Show Content
If a valid token was retrieved in the previous request, the relevant ad was presented based on the associated metadata
What are the potential advantages for Digital Advertising?
- Detects Human vs Bot : One of the biggest concern in the digital advertising industry is Ad Fraud where marketers/brands have complained about paying for bot views to their ads. This approach ensures that browser trusts only those interactions taken by a human. Hence removing bots out of the picture
- More Brand Control About Defining Human Interactions : The document specifies clicks as an example of detecting humans. To ensure higher ROI, brands can define which interactions are human enough to see ads. For example, coolecom decides that only 5+ clicks should be shown ads across the publisher network.
- Secured User Identity : All of the token exchange happens in the background and not accessible through the console/network. Hence there’s no user actually being tracked or any user ID info available in the cookies
- Limited Metadata : Often the context aka metadata required to deliver ads spills over to impact user privacy. The approach requires issuers or advertisers to define the bare minimums to authenticate & fetch appropriate content